Our PivotPoint web part is now compatible with SharePoint 2013 as of version 2.4.0.
You can download and install the latest version here.
If upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 simply perform the upgrade then install the latest version – your old settings and license key will be picked up.
This page will be updated as our other web parts are made SharePoint 2013 compatible
A new version of our PivotPoint web part for SharePoint (v2.2.3) is ready.
This new version improves performance for large lists, corrects bugs when you have angled brackets (“<” and “>”) in your row or columns, adds support for site column lookups and a 2 new features.
The new version of PivotPoint allows you to sort by both the Title and Total rows, either ascending or descending.
For example, instead of sorting alphabetically by product you can sort by their total sales – showing your best performing products at the top of the table or left of the chart.
More details are in the online manual.
In combination with sorting by the Total you can choose to show the Top N columns or rows.
For example given the following data the vast majority of revenue comes from 2 products (Bottle-o-matic and Can-o-Matic) and we have a ‘Long Tail’ of other products.
We can choose to only display the top 2 columns (products) and optionally group all the other sales into “Other”
More details are in the online manual.
You can download and upgrade to the latest version without losing any settings.
FilterPoint has had the ability to send Date Filters but a common request has been Date Ranges – like showing everything this month, last year or between two arbitrary dates.
The good news is that we’ve added this in to FilterPoint as of version 1.2
The bad news is that this will only work with our other SharePoint products – Planner and PivotPoint – it won’t work with SharePoints built in List View web part (LVWP).
Yes it is – it’s just a limitation of SharePoints filtering I am afraid, but all is not lost!
This page shows how you can do things like Month filtering using calculated columns and this blog article shows how you can setup “Current Month/Previous Month” views using nothing more than Calculated Columns and View filters.
As always you can upgrade without losing any settings by downloading and running the latest trial version and selecting “Upgrade” when prompted (don’t forget you need the a recent version of Planner (v2.6.9+) and PivotPoint (2.2.0+) to accept date range filters.
Customers who use our SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner Toolkit often ask about the best way to deal with public holidays. Public Holidays tend to affect the whole team. So you want them clearly marked on your Vacation Planner dashboard, but you certainly don’t want to have to enter each public holiday for each team member as a separate event. And you probably also don’t want to be firing off absence approval requests for each holiday either.
So here are our suggestions on the best way of handling Public Holidays within the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner Toolkit.
First you need modify your list. Go to list settings and open up your “Reason” field. In addition to your existing reasons for absence add a new reason – Public Holiday.
Then open up the settings for your “Requested By” column and make sure you have “Allow Multiple Selections” checked.
Now you need to modify your Planner web part.
So, “Edit Shared Web Part” then, under your “Category” picker, check the “split multiple selections box”. This is key if you want to be able to create just one event for each public holiday but have it show up against each of your team members.
Now go down to the Planner Colors section of the Toolpart and update your color coding by column section to include an extra color code for your new Reason for absence that you created in your list – Public Holiday – I am going for a nice orange.
Now check your PivotPoint web part. For this to work you are going to need PivotPoint 2.1.4 or above. Download it here if you don’t have it already (free to all PivotPoint v2 customers, or v1 customers with Premium Support). In the Toolpart make sure that in the “Split Multiple Values” dropdown you have chosen “Split Records”. This will ensure that when we enter a 1 day public holiday for 4th of July, for example, 1 day gets entered against each team member in the pivot table.
Finally, before we start adding events, to ensure that we don’t accidentally fire off approval requests and notifications all over the place, access the Reminder web parts that you have set up and in the “Reminder Testing” section at the bottom of the Toolpart enter your own email address so that any emails generated whilst you are adding the public holidays go to you. This will be a better solution than simply switching the Reminders off as you work, as it will mean that if any “real” requests are submitted whilst you are working you will be able to redirect them, rather than them being lost.
So, from your Planner dashboard add a new item. Let’s do 4th July. Set it up as an all day event. Set yourself as “approved by”, you will need to approve the event before it will show up in people’s dashboards. Now add your whole team to the “Requested By” field. It’s easiest to do this using the Address Book. Now ensure you have selected “Public Holiday” in your Reason field. Approve the request. Discard all the “Request approved” notifications that are redirected through to you. And now you will see your public holiday, nicely marked against each of your team members. Repeat as needed for all of your other public holidays, remove the redirect from your Reminder emails and then you can relax for another year!
I hope this helps you in using Vacation Planner. If you have any questions or requests about the Vacation Planner we would love to hear them.
Only last month we launched PivotPoint v2, which added charting and drill down to this popular SharePoint tool.
Now we are releasing v2.1.5 which has some pretty nifty new features added as a result of your feedback on v2.
You pointed out that when looking at a chart, if all of your values are bunched between say 90 and 100, viewing them on an axis that runs from 1 to 100 doesn’t make things all that easy to read.
So the new Axis Minimum option lets you choose where your axis starts (in the example above this would be 90) making charts that much easier to read.
In PivotPoint v2 we had disabled the option of using a multi-choice column. We felt that in most circumstances this simply didn’t make sense as an option within a Pivot Chart or Table. But you disagreed, so we put the option to work with multi-choice fields back in and we think we have come up with a way of making it more usable.
So for example, take a simple task list – where as you can see the “Present Proposal” task is assigned to multiple people – Barry and Fred.
In your Pivot Table or chart you can choose to either treat your multi-choice record as a single record, effectively creating a new category in the Pivot Table, like this:
Or you can choose to split the multi-choice record between all the choice categories (in this case people) in it, like this:
If you choose to split multiple choice records between their multiple parts the full value of the record is allocated to each of its choices.
This brings PivotPoint in to line with the way that SharePoint Planner works, so will be especially useful for people who use dashboards with both Planner and PivotPoint deployed, and will also be very useful for our Vacation Planner users – watch this space for an update on how this is going to help you.
Custom fields can cause all sorts of trouble, so previously we had simply outlawed them in PivotPoint in an effort to try and keep things simple. However quite a few of you have said you wanted to be able to use custom fields, so we have now allowed you to enable this feature.
Be warned though, not all types of custom field will work correctly in PivotPoint (depending on their design) and we won’t be able to provide support on 3rd party custom fields.
Full information on all of these changes can be found in the PivotPoint manual.
PivotPoint v2.1.5 is free to download for anyone who has previously purchased PivotPoint v2, or PivotPoint v1 plus Premium Support.
Existing customers can download the latest version here. The new version can be installed directly over the top of the old, and you will retain all of your existing web part settings.
For those of you using PivotPoint on a 30 day free trial, you can upgrade to the new version here, your trial will continue and you will retain any web parts you have set up already.
We hope you find these new features useful and we would love to hear your feedback on them, or any other aspects of PivotPoint v2.
So we all like to know how we are doing – hitting our targets, meeting our KPI’s, staying within our budgets, running out of vacation days.
If you record things like this in SharePoint lists you would hope it would be easy enough to see how your actual performance compares to your targets, budgets or KPI’s.
Well for those of you who have Enterprise and PerformancePoint it is possible – if not exactly a walk in the park – but for the rest of us this can be a tricky task. You need to find a way of bringing together 2 different sets of data:
So if we were looking to compare Target and Actual sales for July, as in the chart above, the date would loook like this. A list of sales items, which will grow as the month progresses, producing a changing Actual total, and one Target item, which will
stay the same throughout the month.
These two data sets would generally live in separate lists. The way many KPI columns work is by getting you to manually enter – and manually update – your changing Actual total into your Target list. Not great, as you never get to see how the situation is changing until you have done your manual update.
In a workaround for one of our PivotPoint customers we have turned this on method on its head – entering the static “Target” into the ~Actuals list (in this example the sales list) to allow you to produce a chart or table with our PivotPoint web part, which will show actuals vs targets and is updated as your actual data changes, without the need for manual intervention.
So here’s how.
Add a new column to your list. Make it a choice column with the choices as “Actual” and “Target”. Have it default to actual, as this is what the vast majority of items are going to be.
Then we simply enter a “Target” item for each category we want to compare. So in this example I want to see actual vs target sales for each of my products. So I have entered a Target Sales item for each of my products for July.
As the month goes on my team will enter actual sales for July, which will (hopefully) start to stack up nicely against my target.
So to see how things are shaping up set up a PivotPoint, get it to watch the sales list, and in this case a “This Month” view of the sales list. Display a Pivot Chart, in this case a column chart.
To see the actual sales vs target sales set it up like this:
And you should end up with a nice column chart like the one above.
The best bit about this is that your chart will update as your list data changes. So let’s say I get a really huge Planner order:
Woohoo – you can take that to the bank!
So, it’s not perfect, it’s a workaround, but some of you might find it useful.
Places you could use this would include:
If you have any other ideas on where this might be useful we would love to hear them.
Eagerly awaited v2 of PivotPoint web part for SharePoint is now available for you to try, or buy.
We think you’re going to like this one.
Some of you will be familiar with PivotPoint already; it lets you summarize complex SharePoint list data by creating Pivot Tables. These update dynamically, as your list data changes. So they are great to use in dashboards for things like keeping an eye on how sales are going, keeping tabs on how your helpdesk is performing, seeing who’s taking way too much sick leave.
People in the finance sector and statisticians have always been really keen on PivotPoint; they understand how useful Pivot Tables are and feel right at home looking at rows of figures all day. For the rest of us a nice colourful chart tends to make things easier to understand at a glance, so that’s what we have added to PivotPoint version 2.
As well as creating Pivot Tables, which are linked directly to your SharePoint list data and therefore update automatically as your list data changes, you can also create Pivot Charts, which are also linked directly to the list. You can choose bar charts, line charts, column charts, funnels, pies – the world’s your oyster! Color code as you wish, and if you want the visualisation and the detail you can display a chart and a table together.
Another advantage of having the web part directly connected to the list is that we have been able to include drill down, from the chart or table, to a filtered view of the list. So for example when I am looking at my “Sales by Product, This Month”, chart, I will be able to hover over the enormous, sky rocketing column which represents this month’s sales for PivotPoint version 2, click on it, and go directly to a list view showing just the sales records for all the people who have bought PivotPoint this month – how cool is that?
The new version also has other handy features, like export to excel, so that you can do more analysis on your figures if needed, and easy printing, because we know SharePoint generally isn’t all that print friendly.
If you are an existing customer you can upgrade to v2 without disrupting any of your existing settings.
If you’re not a customer yet, well what are you waiting for? Take a free trial and see what your SharePoint deployment is missing!
I am sure you have noticed that there is a lot going on here at Pentalogic lately. Just a couple of months ago we launched FilterPoint, which brings fast, flexible filtering to SharePoint lists and web parts. Then we unveiled SharePoint Highlighter which gives you a whole range of color coding, icons and effects to brighten up your lists. And our new free tool View Rescue sorts out an annoying niggle for SharePoint 2010 users.
But we haven’t forgotten our existing products. Feature requests for Planner, Reminder and PivotPoint come in from customers all the time and new versions of all 3 are planned for the coming months.
First off the blocks is PivotPoint with the new version out by May. We are very excited about this and we hope you will be too.
PivotPoint v2 includ
es a host of handy new features like drill down form the Pivot table to relevant list items, the handy “Add New” button which Planner users will be familiar with at the bottom of the display, and charts and graphs.
The charting and graphing functionality will mean that you will be able to choose to view bar, line, pie. Column and area charts as well, or instead of the traditional Pivot table.
We think that this is really going to bring dashboards to life – imagine your Sales Team being able to view “Sales to Date” as a dynamic color bar chart, generated straight from the SharePoint list? Or the Helpdesk viewing a pie chart of current open requests by status, or age?
We have always thought PivotPoint was pretty nifty: it’s the only tool we know of that applies Pivot Table, or Cross Tabulation functionality directly to SharePoint lists. But as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words (or in this case should it be numbers?) and we think that when you see the charts PivotPoint can produce directly from SharePoint lists, you are going to wonder how you ever managed without it.
PivotPoint v2 will be available in the next few weeks. For immediate notice of the release subscribe to the blog RSS feed, or email me at: clare.stone@pentalogic.net
Tooltips – those little boxes that pop up when you hover over something – can be a blessing or a bit of a nightmare. It drives me nuts when people enable those snapshot tooltips on every hyperlink on a page. the resulting pop ups are huge, usually contain info I don’t want to see, and seem to hang around on the screen for ever.
But imagine a tooltip where you choose exactly what information is displayed? How cool would that be? Well that’s exactly what you get with tooltips in our PivotPoint web part for SharePoint – which is why I think they rock.
Hi everyone.
We wanted to share this new SharePoint case study with you. It shows how online security specialists Websense are using our PivotPoint webapart to slice and dice their marketing list data, and create some awesome, dynamic dashboards.
